Unified Storage: Answering the call for storage solution

BANGALORE, INDIA: As explained in the previous article, the SMB segment will be one of the big drivers of information storage products in future — rising IT adoption, digitization and automation of services, and information security and back-up being key reasons.

Buyers of IT products and solutions from the SMB segment have been known for some specific traits that make them an 'SMB customer', Some include: As businesses running anywhere between very small teams to medium-sized teams, SMBs mostly run IT operations on their own instead of hiring specialists in-house or external consultants who add to the overheads.

An SMB customer hence becomes reliant on the technology vendor/reseller on technical support and also an IT consultant, besides being the salesman. At the same time, by not having technical support, SMBs also need technology solutions which are self-operable, easy-to-deploy and easily manageable.

IT investments from SMBs mostly follow a pattern of “follow the business”; meaning, up-spend at times of growth and expansion, and cut spends during times of modest/ weak growth.

Investing in IT contrary to the business’ growth curve is not typically in an SMB’s plan (which is also usually the trend seen across the industry unless there is a game-changer).

However, SMBs generally tend to invest in their IT in a phased manner, due to a “plan-as-you-go” approach for IT infrastructure.

Importantly, like large enterprises who want to be assured of returns on capital IT investments, SMBs too demand not just operational IT performance, however, also performance that favourably impacts their business.

As the scope of the SMB’s core business has widened and deepened, it has led to more staff strength and branch expansion, a greater reliance on timely information and secured information, and eventually the demands of storage solutions from SMBs too have changed considerably.

Owing to their typical nature (as discussed above) SMBs want simple, secure and reliable storage solutions. And for several reasons, a Unified Storage solution is exceptionally suitable for SMBs.

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Today’s market leading unified storage solutions focus on the best balance of efficiency, simplified deployment and management, and performance. For example, SMBs typically need storage capacity that can expand as they grow; and in an SMB’s lifecycle, upgrading capacity as a result of growth and immediate expansion is normally the first step in storage evolution.

Unified storage solutions can help provision storage very rapidly — several hundreds of Exchange mailboxes can be configured in a few minutes, for example, unified storage solutions help provision efficiently by automatically multiplying storage capacity utilization using advanced data reduction technologies in optimum time.

Data management efficiency is a key element in a storage solution to an SMB. Issues like data compliance, thin provisioning, data de-duplication, back-up/disaster recovery need to be dealt with in a cost-effective and timely way. By having a consolidated (NAS and SAN) approach, unified storage systems address these concerns very effectively.

Since dedicated technical support staff is a luxury for some SMBs (until perhaps when they reach the crossover point to become Small and Medium Enterprises), and sorting out IT issues is a burden, the terms “ease-of-use” and “simplicity” are all the more important for an SMB when there are no experts to lend assistance. This is distinctive in SMBs with branch and remote offices.

To their rescue, market-leading unified storage solutions today provide access to highly visual diagnostic management and support that provides automated diagnosis and technical support information in a single click. Direct access to FAQs, online forums and live support in unified storage solutions today make them precious to SMBs for this reason single-handedly.

Storage solutions for SMBs today are custom-built. They are built to suit the very nimble requirements of a single-digit team size of an SMB, and to the fast-growing and “I don’t have time for IT” type of an SMB as well. Given the rapidly increasing digital information footprint and the fact that applications are headed to the cloud or already accessed from the cloud, storage solutions for SMBs today need to help users easily run and manage their IT environments, automate tiering, protect data, ensure security and meet compliance needs.

And unified storage solutions of today do that job very effectively, and enable these “next big businesses” in such a fine fashion that storage is simplified for the IT generalist and the SMB doesn’t need any storage expertise as such.

The author is regional president,  Global Accounts, APJ, EMC